recollindex (1)

Leading comments

$Id: recollindex.1,v 1.7 2008-09-05 10:25:54 dockes Exp $ (C) 2005 J.F.Dockes\$

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man1/recollindex.1".)

NAME

recollindex - indexing command for the Recoll full text search system

SYNOPSIS

recollindex -h
recollindex [ -c <configdir> ] [ -z|-Z ] [ -k ]
recollindex [ -c <cd> ] -m [ -w <secs> ] [ -D ] [ -x ] [ -C ] [ -n|-k ]
recollindex [ -c <cd> ] -i [ -Z ] [ -k ] [ -f ] [<path [path ...]>]
recollindex [ -c <configdir> ] -r [ -Z ] [ -K ] [ -e ] [ -f ] [ -p pattern ] <dirpath>
recollindex [ -c <configdir> ] -e [<path [path ...]>]
recollindex [ -c <configdir> ] -l
recollindex [ -c <configdir> ] -s <lang>
recollindex [ -c <configdir> ] -S
recollindex [ -c <configdir> ] -E

DESCRIPTION

The recollindex utility allows you to perform indexing operations for the Recoll text search system.

As indexing can sometimes take a long time, the command can be interrupted by sending an interrupt (Ctrl-C, SIGINT) or terminate (SIGTERM) signal. Some time may elapse before the process exits, because it needs to properly flush and close the index. This can also be done from the recoll GUI (menu entry: File/Stop_Indexing). After such an interruption, the index will be somewhat inconsistent because some operations which are normally performed at the end of the indexing pass will have been skipped (for example, the stemming and spelling databases will be inexistant or out of date). You just need to restart indexing at a later time to restore consistency. The indexing will restart at the interruption point (the full file tree will be traversed, but files that were indexed up to the interruption and for which the index is still up to date will not need to be reindexed).

The -c option specifies the configuration directory name, overriding the default or $RECOLL_CONFDIR.

There are several modes of operation.

The normal mode will index the set of files described in the configuration file recoll.conf. This will incrementally update the database with files that changed since the last run. If option -z is given, the database will be erased before starting. If option -Z is given, the database will not be reset, but all files will be considered as needing reindexing (in place reset).

As of version 1.21, recollindex usually does not process again files which previously failed to index (for example because of a missing helper program). If option -k is given, recollindex will try again to process all failed files. Please note that recollindex may also decide to retry failed files if the auxiliary checking script defined by the "checkneedretryindexscript" configuration variable indicates that this should happen.

If option -m is given, recollindex is started for real time monitoring, using the file system monitoring package it was configured for (either fam, gamin, or inotify). This mode must have been explicitly configured when building the package, it is not available by default. The program will normally detach from the controlling terminal and become a daemon. If option -D is given, it will stay in the foreground. Option -w <seconds> can be used to specify that the program should sleep for the specified time before indexing begins. The default value is 60. The daemon normally monitors the X11 session and exits when it is reset. Option -x disables this X11 session monitoring (daemon will stay alive even if it cannot connect to the X11 server). You need to use this too if you use the daemon without an X11 context. You can use option -n to skip the initial incrementing pass which is normally performed before monitoring starts. Once monitoring is started, the daemon normally monitors the configuration and restarts from scratch if a change is made. You can disable this with option -C

recollindex -i will index individual files into the database. The stem expansion and aspell databases will not be updated. The skippedPaths and skippedNames configuration variables will be used, so that some files may be skipped. You can tell recollindex to ignore skippedPaths and skippedNames by setting the -f option. This allows fully custom file selection for a given subtree, for which you would add the top directory to skippedPaths, and use any custom tool to generate the file list (ie: a tool from a source code control system).

recollindex -e will erase data for individual files from the database. The stem expansion databases will not be updated.

Options -i and -e can be combined. This will first perform the purge, then the indexing.

With options -i or -e , if no file names are given on the command line, they will be read from stdin, so that you could for example run:

find /path/to/dir -print | recollindex -e -i

to force the reindexing of a directory tree (which has to exist inside the file system area defined by topdirs in recoll.conf). You could mostly accomplish the same thing with

find /path/to/dir -print | recollindex -Z -i

The latter will perform a less thorough job of purging stale sub-documents though.

recollindex -r mostly works like -i , but the parameter is a single directory, which will be recursively updated. This mostly does nothing more than find topdir | recollindex -i but it may be more convenient to use when started from another program. This retries failed files by default, use option -K to change. One or multiple -p options can be used to set shell-type selection patterns (e.g.: *.pdf).

recollindex -l will list the names of available language stemmers.

recollindex -s will build the stem expansion database for a given language, which may or may not be part of the list in the configuration file. If the language is not part of the configuration, the stem expansion database will be deleted at the end of the next normal indexing run. You can get the list of stemmer names from the recollindex -l command. Note that this is mostly for experimental use, the normal way to add a stemming language is to set it in the configuration, either by editing "recoll.conf" or by using the GUI indexing configuration dialog.
At the time of this writing, the following languages are recognized (out of Xapian's stem.h):

*

danish

*

dutch

*

english Martin Porter's 2002 revision of his stemmer

*

english_lovins Lovin's stemmer

*

english_porter Porter's stemmer as described in his 1980 paper

*

finnish

*

french

*

german

*

italian

*

norwegian

*

portuguese

*

russian

*

spanish

*

swedish

recollindex -S will rebuild the phonetic/orthographic index. This feature uses the aspell package, which must be installed on the system.

recollindex -E will check the configuration file for topdirs and other relevant paths existence (to help catch typos).

SEE ALSO

recoll(1) recoll.conf(5)